Merchants Of Venus VS Magic Realm VS Gunslinger

I'll go with Magic Realm on this one.

Haven't actually played any of them, but I have the greatest desire to try Magic Realm.

Schweig! wrote:

quozl wrote:

Voters should label one game GOOD, one game BAD, and one game UGLY!

Are you crazy?

It will already be tough enough applying the tags: ALL TOO AWESOME, AWESOME and SLIGHTLY LESS AWESOME.

Too funny.

Vote: Magic Realm

There just aren't enough great western-themed games. And who doesn't love a good western?

I tap my throat and say, "Thank ye, sai"



VOTE: Gunslinger

Now this, my friends, is a Mexican standoff.

Three games, equally great, and completely unique and all designed by Richard Hamblen.

MAGIC REALM is still the most complete fantasy adventure game ever published. But it's saddled with inaccessibility and a couple of old timey things that slow it down. It's a masterpiece of game design, and the endpoint for the "RPG on a board" search.

MERCHANT OF VENUS is one of the great, if not _the_ great pick-up-and-deliver game. It's where a lot of Eurogame designers should be looking for influence rather than what's hot at Essen this year. It's a fun, funny game with a great economic sense and a real sense of adventure and development.

GUNSLINGER is a Sam Peckinpah action sequence translated into game mechanics. There's nothing else quite like it, and conceptually the game not only depicts western shootouts, but it also depicts a level of minute detail and _time_ in a way that no other game ever has. Every time I play it I'm blown away by it, even though it has some old timey elements like MR that beg for just a tiny bit of redevelopment.

I don't have a favorite, and I'd rank all three in "top 20 games of all time" list. But I'm going to vote for GUNSLINGER here because it's probably the least appreciated out of the games, and definitely the least emulated. And more people need to be playing it, and a high profile Trashdome win might do it some good.

Hmm, doesn't this translate into Euro vs AT vs wargame?

Aarontu wrote:

I'll go with Magic Realm on this one.

Haven't actually played any of them, but I have the greatest desire to try Magic Realm.

Same here, but Gunslinger for me

Vote Gunslinger

Its sad how many people haven't played these games.

Its even sadder that I'm one of them.

I haven't played any of these games, but I have downloaded and looked at the Gunslinger Vassal module, and might try to figure that out one of these days. So purely from the perspective of what interests me the most of those three, definitely Gunslinger gets the vote.

Well, Grudunza, if you ever want to do a PBEM or live VASSAL thing, I'm game.

Vote: Gunslinger

mjl1783 wrote:

Well, Grudunza, if you ever want to do a PBEM or live VASSAL thing, I'm game.

I'm in too. The VASSAL module is a bit complicated, but I've been dicking around with it trying to get a handle on it.

Despite never fully comprehending it, I'm voting Magic Realm.
Opening that box and sorting through its contents has been the closest thing to a mystical experience ever caused by a board game: The infinite combination of hexagonal tiles, with their hidden paths and tunnels and their brilliantly colorful "enchanted" sides. The character portraits that were rather dark in theme and pretty amazing for their time (they were/are oil-painting-like and kinda translucent - as a kid I would hold them up to the light in order to bring out more detail). The huge variety of counters and cards.
Couple that with the obtuse rules, and it was like attending some difficult alchemal school where the struggles were great but the potential reward greater.
Never before and never since have I encountered the like.

The King in Yellow wrote:

Despite never fully comprehending it, I'm voting Magic Realm.
Opening that box and sorting through its contents has been the closest thing to a mystical experience ever caused by a board game: The infinite combination of hexagonal tiles, with their hidden paths and tunnels and their brilliantly colorful "enchanted" sides. The character portraits that were rather dark in theme and pretty amazing for their time (they were/are oil-painting-like and kinda translucent - as a kid I would hold them up to the light in order to bring out more detail). The huge variety of counters and cards.
Couple that with the obtuse rules, and it was like attending some difficult alchemal school where the struggles were great but the potential reward greater.
Never before and never since have I encountered the like.

This reminds me of comments by someone at TOS, talking about Android. She rated it a 10 even though she has no intention of ever playing it, just because she considered it to be a special cultural artifact or some such.

ubarose wrote:

The summer I lived in a one room cabin, I found a copy of Magic Realm in a used book store for $7. I decided that, since there was nothing to do in the middle of the woods after dark, I would learn to play Magic Realm. On my third night of pushing chits around, my nearest neighbor, who lived in a tree house stopped by. She and her girl friend had put some beers and a bottle of vodka in the creek earlier that day, and expected they'd be cold by now, and invited me to join them and some of the other ladies over at the creek. Turns out there is plenty to do in the middle of the woods after dark. I never did learn Magic realms.

I vote Merchants of Venus, unless the other option I skinny dipping by moonlight with girls who live in a tree house.

[Jayne Cobb] I'll be in my bunk. [/Jayne Cobb]